The present invention relates to a new and improved construction of automatic railless ground conveyor installation of the type comprising a passive guide track which defines the route or stretch network and individual driverless or unmanned traveling conveyor cars or vehicles, each of which is equipped with a steering mechanism which scans in a contactless manner the guide track as well as a work control mechanism which contains a code reader in order to scan in a contactless manner individual code markings arranged at branches and identifying the same and directly influencing the steering mechanism in the sense of reaching a target or destination determined by a target code set at the work control mechanism.
Automatic trackless or railless ground conveyor installations of the previously mentioned type have become known to the art from the German Pat. No. 1,481,482, corresponding to U.S. Pat. No. 3,474,877. The conveyor cars of such ground conveyor installation are associated with the difficulty of exactly guiding such along the guide track since at the branching-off locations of the guide track, the so-called branches or junctions, the conveyor cars each carry out the same steering deflection irrespective of the deviation of the conveyor car from the guide track. This results in a certain compromise with regard to the magnitude of the steering deflection, with the result that the correction deflection is too great in those instances where there is a small branching-off from the guide track and too small in those instances where there is a more pronounced branching-off. As a result the conveyor car begins to oscillate. Moreover, the work control mechanism of such conveyor car is complicated since in the case of a branch-off location at a junction or branch which must be detected as a function of the target code the steering mechanism must deliver a command for achieving a positive steering deflection.